Spiritual world

If there's no birth, death, old age and disease in the spiritual world, how are we to understand that there are "elderly gopas and gopis" there who have paternal relationships with Krishna?

Our Answer:
The older gopas and gopis—cowherd men and women who are part of Krishna's eternal pastimes in the spiritual world—don't experience the sensual malfunctioning that characterizes old age in this world.

Here, in the material world, time has the effect of changing everyone's body every moment. When our body is young, we generally want to enjoy, but once our bodies become old, we get disappointed because we still want to enjoy but our bodies don't work as well as they once did, and become sources of pain.

It is said that in the spiritual world the effects of time are conspicuous by their absence. Time there is eternal, and so are everyone's bodies. Our bodies there are made of eternity, bliss, and knowledge, and are perfectly suited for an exchange of love and affection with Krishna. No one is sorry to have any kind of body there, because there the self is identical with the body. There's no difference.

The elderly gopas and gopis eternally feel the complete fulfillment of all their desires by being able to relate with Krishna in a mood of parental affection—vatsalya rasa. That's their permanent relationship with Krishna, and their eternal, spiritual form is of a completely different quality than that of material bodies, which are young one minute and elderly the next.